No Yin For His Yang? Smoothing over Mom Nature to Justify Same-sex unions

By Daniel Pech | Nov 05, 2012

Basic equality of humans does not make being crippled equal to being fully bipedal.

But, the state of being crippled is not itself a motive. To be motivated toward something that inherently causes oneself or others to become crippled is an aberrant motive. How crippled is too crippled to bear it?

Is there no possible such thing as an aberrant sexual orientation? And, even assuming there is, is even it not a consequence of something committed in the past by someone else? And, if it is, how aberrant could that ‘something' have been?

In his Blissful Union post, (http://waldo.villagesoup.com/blog/blogpost/blissful-union/920104), Kit Hayden rationalizes same-sex marriage by stating that almost all of us 'get along better with members of our own gender' than with anyone of the opposite gender.

If people 'get along' better with their own gender, then why did Mother Nature/Evolution/God bother to make two genders? If Hayden loves Eastern spirituality so much, and if he thinks marriage is ever at all a good thing, then where's his Yin for his Yang?

We would 'get along' better with our clones, but, for some reason(s), Mom Nature decided we needed variety. Most heterosexuals would be shocked to be told that coitus is inherently better, not to mention safer, with someone of their respective gender than with a suitable individual of the opposite gender.

In all terms, evolutionary and otherwise, even without the need to defend against predation there is the need for 'specialization of labor': one specializing in nurturing, another specializing in exploring. I highly recommend reading the entirety of Glenn Stanton's Secure Daughters, Confident Sons.

The fact is, sexual attraction for one’s own gender rather than for the opposite gender is the absence of the initial key factor for reproduction, and thus the absence of the primary cohesive force of progenitive society. Short of external regulators informing the need for normative heterosexual mating behavior, a population consisting entirely of individuals who lack opposite-sex attraction would die off. In other words, imagine a functionally isolated population made up entirely of purely same-sex attracted persons, and imagine that none of those persons has any hint of the fact that humans have the power to procreate: such a population would, at best, simply die off if none of those persons ever was informed of that power nor of the means by which that power is exercised. 'Mamma, where do babies come from?' 'I have no idea, child.'

By this account, same-sex attraction may be defined as a dysfunction or disability, and, at least in some ways, a most severe, and personally trying, one. By this account, moreover, if sexual attraction were likened to nutritional appetite, then same-sex-attraction would be like appetite for rocks instead of for food.

If, (and only if) there is any inherent problem with same-sex attraction, then there is an even deeper inherent problem with same-sex 'coitus': it is strictly aberrant, a kind of gambling with borrowed biological capital. And Mother Nature owns the metals, the coin, the bank, and the casino.

If 'Civil rights' is like Checkers, then the biological foundations of a sustainable society is like Chess. People are free to think Checkers is the most profound game, but they are not free to believe that Mother Nature thinks so. Despite their presumption that they are playing Her at Checkers, She may, in fact, be playing them at Chess.

To think Mom Nature is just a secular ‘business woman’ with no political opinion is to think that the microbiological ecology on which our individual and collective health depends is essentially random. It is one thing to welcome gambling addicts as friends. It’s another to believe they know what they’re doing with money. Relative to the congruent naivety, some corners seem far more justifiably cut than others. This is especially the case for those corners that, to those who are all-but-insensible to them, seem not to be there at all.

I think everything is connected: that any actions we take in the social, political, or microbiological worlds have some impact on the totality of each, and on collectively all of them.

I think the social, political, and microbiological worlds each are most naturally open to mutual benefit with all parts of each.

I think this mutuality of inter-benefit is where we get our general sense of conscience. But, social civil conscience, and respect for an admittedly very fallible version of scientific authority, is no replacement for basic biological sensibility.

Is there no such thing as not knowing what one is doing with sex? It seems Hayden would have us believe that sex is the saving grace; that sex is like the boy Joseph, so that all other realms of human concern, from politics and education to diet and personal finance, are like Joseph’s ten evil bothers: only provisionally good, and only after they’ve passed the test and repented to Joseph.

But, as virtually everyone with a libido will admit, sexuality not only is potentially the best (i.e., highest) common denominator, it also is potentially the worst (lowest).

Basic equality of humans does not make being crippled equal to being fully bipedal.

But, the state of being crippled is not itself a motive. To be motivated toward something that inherently causes oneself or others to become crippled is an aberrant motive. How crippled is too crippled to bear it? Is there no possible such thing as an aberrant sexual orientation? And, even assuming there is, is even it not a consequence of something committed in the past by someone else? And, if it is, how aberrant was that ‘something?

Posted by: Harold Richardson | Nov 12, 2012 13:57

Hey Danny-you and Laurie should get together.

Posted by: Daniel Pech | Nov 12, 2012 13:05

Further to Gene Newton:

Given that dimorphic social organisms are partly geared to reproducing themselves (namely by a sexual bond between the two forms), it is obvious that the most straight-forward kind of perception regarding the agency of reproduction among such organisms has the natural hegemony on such perception. Heterosexuality in humans is, if nothing else, the most cost-effective, and otherwise purpose-driven, human sexual orientation in terms of the reproduction of humans.

Basic equality of humans does not make being crippled equal to being fully bipedal. So, to insist that disability is equal to ability is, in effect, to claim that anyone who thinks disability is disability is being bigoted. Worse, it is, in effect, to claim that disability is superior to ability. But, of course, you don’t claim that homosexuality is a superior sexual orientation, since you don’t think it is more ‘adaptable’ than heterosexuality (I’m being sarcastic).

You’re arguing, rather, that homosexuality should be thought of by heterosexuals as principally undifferentiated from heterosexuality: that it doesn’t, or shouldn’t matter to anyone what sexual orientation one has.

But, if it shouldn’t matter what sexual orientation one has, then what about a human’s sexual orientation to non-human animals instead of to humans? Or, what about a human’s sexual orientation to that human’s biological parent or child? Does such alternative sexual orientation make persons with those orientations more adaptable, or less adaptable? Surely, the answer cannot be Both’, but must be ‘One vs. the other’.

Nevertheless, a person who genuinely has such an ‘alternative’ orientation (and principally no other sexual orientation) genuinely has that orientation, and may rationalize that anyone who finds that orientation aberrant is bigoted, and even who wants to take away their right to have sexual feelings, and to express those feelings.

So, as I hope you can see, such an ‘alternative’ sexual orientation must be framed either as a most tragic kind of disability, or as not a disability at all. But, if it really is a disability, then to frame it as not a disability is to allow, if not force, a philosophical reframing of normal heterosexuality as the inferior sexuality (as less adaptable/less adapted). But, if these ‘alternate’ sexualities really are not a disability, yet the same reframing of heterosexuality as inferior occurs.

So, equality between the basic kinds of humans (male/female, black/white, introvert/extrovert, etc.) does not imply equality between ability and disability. Of course, a principle tragedy of some of the most tragic kinds of disabilities is that persons with those disabilities are treated by normal persons in ways that are at odds with the well-being of those disabled persons. For example, many persons with autism are treated under the assumption that they have normal perceptual faculties and so whose actions are presumed to be principally motivated by the kinds of motives which a normal person would have to be motivated by in order to act that way.

If you would wish to insist that born a-sexuality is not a disability, then at least you will admit that it is the absence of a principal kind of motive for action, so that the person who is born genuinely lacking any sexual interest can no more feel prevented from acting sexual than can a person born fully blind feel prevented from painting en plein air.

Of course, to be blind in a sighted world is to be prevented the fuller range of socially cohesive perceptions, so that if one is especially socially inclined, one may feel some loss at being somewhat left out of all the social things that occur by way of sightedness.

But, blindness is not itself either an alternate perceptual motive nor an absence of other, normal perceptual motives: the perceptual hyper-lucidation of hearing, smell, touch, etc, which occurs for being blind does not socially repel sighted persons, but tends to socially compensate for the blindness.

But, the existence of automatically deeply socially compensatory disabilities such as blindness does not mean it is impossible for there to exist disabilities that lack much of such compensation. Being crippled is one example.

But, then, there are disabilities that have directly socially repelling features, including those caused by perceptual abnormalities rather than by a simple loss to the perceptual panoply.

Posted by: Daniel Pech | Nov 11, 2012 02:24

Dear Gene Newton,

Thank you for making the effort to inform the ignorant and backward regarding the various important things you address. Given what few words you know me by, you are very right: they are words which would fit well with a Nazi-istic paradigm. But, I oppose such a paradigm. Moreover, despite my often failures, I hope and endeavor to think, feel and live worthy of a pluralist, humanist society-and-government.

As for Stanton’s own view, and mine, regarding the roles of male and female, that view is very open-ended and complex, as I hope you should learn if you read Stanton’s book thoroughly.

As for disability and same-sex attraction: First, consider that disabilities are as relative to their assistive contexts as you make artificial procreative powers out to be. I believe you are right, at least up to a point: a person who is bound to same-sex attraction is not therein disabled when that attraction is considered in the context of artificial reproductive technology and within a culture of inclusive diversity (which includes both heterosexuals and non-heterosexuals). Second, I, personally, am very disabled in various ways, and I identify with disability of all sorts (even if, on rare occasions, I’m under the influence of a certain one of my own more tragic disabilities: psychological hyper-suggestibility).

Now, about government’s role in marriage. Society has a certain, if very complex, accountability to itself. Society exercises this accountability through any and all of its executive, judicial, and legislative actions, whether any of these actions are performed directly by the people or by some professional actors (i.e., government). One of the things a society must prevent is the extreme adverse biological consequences of various psychologically-and-mechanically possible aberrant behaviors, these behaviors being therewith defined and intuited as aberrant. One such aberrant behavior which is intuited as such prior to any sensibly identifiable adverse biological consequence is coitus between a parent and that parent’s biological offspring. The reason such a coital relationship is intuited as aberrant prior to any sensibly indentifiable adverse biological consequence is because…

…everything is connected (please inform me if you think this is not so). Any actions we take in the social, political, or microbiological worlds have some impact on the totality of each, and on collectively all of them. Of course, false intuitions are possible to be learned―even, in many cases, without their being intended by those person’s whose actions so effect those who learn them.

But, the ‘voices’ of most, if not all, true intuitions can be made to seem increasingly faint by actions which are in direct conflict with such intuitions, even to the point at which their ‘sound’ is so faint as not to be noticed at all.

I would most especially direct your attention to the fact that I believe that the social, political, and microbiological realms of human life each are most naturally open to mutual benefit with all parts of each.

I believe that this mutuality of inter-benefit of all realms of human life is where we get our general sense of conscience. So, I believe that our conceptual compartmentalization, if not practical over-simplification, of widely various practical matters is much more a cognitive convenience than an accurate description of the world.

So, as to the debates about ‘legislating morality’, there are wrong acts which a professional executive branch ought to prevent, and there are wrong acts which that branch must tolerate. That one should not be forced to inhale harmful tobacco smoke in order just to live one’s life is something not to be tolerated by a caring society, and thus not to be tolerated by government. But, there are other things which ought not to be tolerated, including, I believe, some things which are not so easily known, empirically, to be bad. And, even of those things which are easily enough known to be bad, not all of them are as simple or clear a matter to people as is tobacco smoke.

So, it is one thing to vote on issues based on the knowledge one gets by staring at a blank wall in deep thought, and another to ‘do in Rome as the Romans do’. The ancient Greek aristocratic worship of ‘blank wall’ knowledge is a very easy kind of knowledge of obtain when compared to the sheer, interconnected complexity of the real world. Despite having a slave-supported economy in common, the Romans were, at least, more down-to-Earth than the Greeks. So long as I live in the modern pluralist society, I have a duty to be sure that the things I find unsaid by anyone else gets put on the table, including my hunches as to the nature of certain politically and epigenetically pivotal disabilities.

If heterosexually-produced knowledge of the power and means of human procreation is the assistive context for those disabilities, that context does not, to my logic, redefine those disabilities as viable alternatives to heterosexuality. Without that context, I see nothing viable about them. To my mind, they, at best, borrow from that context.

My own sense sincerely is that, if they engage in their preferred kind of sexual activity, they cannot help rob from that context, from that biological capital, much as a man riding a raging bull through a china shop, regardless their good and mild intentions. My hunch may be mistaken, but it is not irrational.

For anyone to prove to themselves that my hunch is mistaken, much less convince anyone else (including me) by records of that proof that it is mistaken, would take quite a complex and costly research endeavor. I have a hunch that no one on your side, much less a pluralistic body, is up to that challenge. But, it is the level of proof I personally require, and I doubt there is any logic, short of that proof, that I would find equal to that proof. I do not believe I am backwards, nor more ignorant than yourself. And, I plead only my own hunches and intuitions, as I suppose you plead yours.

Be well.

Posted by: Gene Newton | Nov 10, 2012 07:31

Mr. Pech,

I wasn’t sure sir if you were able to be influenced or persuaded by logic. You views seemed so primitive and archaic that I thought you to be a relic of a prior era. Perhaps you are uniformed and for that I will offer up a multitude and reasons for basis of why government should had no role in promoting nor participating in discrimination.

In paragraph two, you state, “ Why did Mother Nature/Evolution/God bother to create two genders” Flawed statement and as such improper basis for your judgment. I assume you are only counting “male” and “female” and gender and not the 1.7% of live births deemed to be an intersex child which is one having some chromosomal, anatomical and hormonal exception(s) to the dimorphic ideal. Source- http://www.neiu.edu/~lsfuller/5sexesrevisited.htm My guess is you would discriminate and those citizens immensely and probably not wish them to ever marry. No, perhaps you view them as so disabled that they should be euthanized or aborted so as not to clutter the gene pool. Your presented position would seem to support this kind of logic.

In paragraph 4 regarding specialization of labor. Stanton’s religious ramblings and assertions that like in Proverbs 22:6, "train a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not turn from it." is again archaic. What if your point here? It seems that you are suggesting a woman’s place is in the home nurturing and the male role is to be exploring? Society has progressed far beyond this whether you accept it or want it to.

In paragraph 5 you reach new highs in your backwards thinking. While I can acknowledge that same sex only attraction could results in a species dying off this would not necessarily be the case currently with ours. Through science, mankind has discovered how to procreate without direct intercourse so indeed artificial insemination could provide for the ability of the species to continue. This oversight notwithstanding, the crux of your projected ignorance comes from your assertion that somehow those “afflicted” with same sex attraction should be defined as disabled. Please refer to http://www.eeoc.gov/laws/statutes/adaaa.cfmregarding the definition of disabled. I think perhaps you have not been exposed to disability in your life experiences because one with an intellect such as yours should be able to grasp that those “afflicted” by same sex attraction have no such impairment that limits one or more major life activity nor a record of such impairment. I can understand your archaic reasoning because those with disabilities are usually discriminated against because of other people's negative and stereotypical attitudes, so that is a shared trait with homosexuality. That doesn't make homosexuality a disability, but does make it subject to similar discrimination.

And that was the point to my reply. Government should have no role in discriminating against it citizens. To deny access to marry to any person based on their gender is unjust.

Respectfully, Gene Newton

Posted by: Daniel Pech | Nov 09, 2012 13:56

Hey Harold Richardson,

I'm fairly sure you don't mean to include sex between a father and his own biological daughter in that 'consenting adults' (and I hope you'll tell me if you do mean to include that in it, and then also tell me why that kind of 'consenting relationship' is even immediately Ok).

I do have a question, though, which I'm not sure how everyone with your view would answer it. The best I can do here is to ask you (and anyone else who reads this who shares your view):

Say you live in India, where there is a lot of corruption among government officials (and, I would think, probably a lot of oppression of workers by business leaders). Do you think it would be Ok for a person living in India to be high on marijuana in his free time?

Or, say you had a friend who was being so oppressed at work that his health is suffering, and you think you might be able to help him. Would it be Ok if, instead of trying to help him, you spent your free time getting high on marijuana? As long as the 'weather' is fair, everyone likes fair weather friends. But...?

Also, everyone likes having good parents. But, as it goes, consenting adults of all degrees of virtue seem to have the right to procreate. And, all biological parents seem to have the right to give their kids away to whomever they please.

Posted by: Harold Richardson | Nov 09, 2012 06:36

Hey Dan-Blah-blah-blah

Hows about we just let people live their short lives the way that's best for them. I don't care how my neighbors live or what happens in their bedroom or on their kitchen table. As long as it's two or more consenting adults it's none of my business. You do know that gay marriage is not mandatory for all?

Posted by: Daniel Pech | Nov 08, 2012 21:38

Dear Gene Newton,

Thank you for sharing your opinion. I'm willing to grant the possibility that you are right, and that I am wrong. I also would like to expressly offer you the benefit of the doubt, so that you have every possible opportunity to use whatever insightful logic you may have to express why my ideas here are wrong, misguided, backwards, narrow-minded, etc.

But, I don't believe all 'possibilities' are all equally possible. And, though I find many of them emotionally meaningful, I currently don't know of any pro-homosexual-marriage arguments that I personally find persuasive.

Your comment is interesting, but it does not seem to me substantive in any way: it does no more, as far as I can see, than that done by a person who stands up in the middle of court proceedings and, without any attempt to express to the court the least logic of his view, object to the court's proceedings.

A person is at liberty to object to anything he will. But, if your view is right, and mine is wrong, then I believe there must be something to your view which not only transcends mine, but on the basis of which you can construct a coherent rebuttal to any arguments I make in favor of mine. An appeal, on your part, to the fact that some majority shares your view is not, to my mind, an instance of such rebuttal. Such an appeal, whether tacit or express, does not show whatever superior logic you think you have on your side. At worse, it may show a deep intellectual and practical impotence on the part of any group which offers such in place of a rebuttal.

Again, sincerely, thank you for sharing your opinion. I hope that you find whatever good you seek, and never any evil.

Posted by: Gene Newton | Nov 08, 2012 10:15

What a backwards and narrow minded individual you portray yourself as. The personal choices people make regarding relationships, marriage, and even sexuality are none of your concern. Judge them you may but no government should be in the business of discriminating against it citizens on these bases.